PPM42, which corresponds to pages 69-70 in Being and Learning, marks a dropping of the original stone, which are the two key fragments from Plato's Republic (from lines 485, 518-519) -- one 'stone dropping' cf. the commentaries from this past week on the description the writing process as the dropping of stones in a pond and pursuing the generated rings until the pond water becomes still again, and the stone is retrieved and dropped in again...until this moment, I hadn't thought about the 'problem' of 'retrieval' of a dropped stone (aka a significant fragment/borrowed quotation, and or concept).
So PPM42, which is the material that gets chapter 4 on Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" underway, is an opportunity for me to both build on the 'philosophy of a people' as a ground-breaking, path-breaking movement (wandering) by describing it as emerging from the fundamental or primary or originary re-turning to the disclosure of human freedom by Being's presencing. Originary re-turning signifies the turning around that prompts or initiates thinking, which is the name for the more general modality I call Learning. The effacement with Being's presencing, the disclosure of human freedom, is the origin of Learning. Doing some-thing is the response to this gift, this call to Learning, or learning undertaken as a project of formation, making, etc. And if we liken the human person, the one making-music, to an instrument, then the originary disclosure is a tuning, or, to borrow from Heidegger, an 'attunement'. So I write in PPM42: "this originary turning 'grounding attunement,' or that which 'attunes Dasein and thus attunes thinking as projecting-open the truth of being in word and concept.'" I add further: "In order to make music, an instrument must constantly be 'kept in tune,' and thus constantly tuned or modally adjusted. The originary turning is akin to this perpetual tuning."
So PPM42, which is the material that gets chapter 4 on Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" underway, is an opportunity for me to both build on the 'philosophy of a people' as a ground-breaking, path-breaking movement (wandering) by describing it as emerging from the fundamental or primary or originary re-turning to the disclosure of human freedom by Being's presencing. Originary re-turning signifies the turning around that prompts or initiates thinking, which is the name for the more general modality I call Learning. The effacement with Being's presencing, the disclosure of human freedom, is the origin of Learning. Doing some-thing is the response to this gift, this call to Learning, or learning undertaken as a project of formation, making, etc. And if we liken the human person, the one making-music, to an instrument, then the originary disclosure is a tuning, or, to borrow from Heidegger, an 'attunement'. So I write in PPM42: "this originary turning 'grounding attunement,' or that which 'attunes Dasein and thus attunes thinking as projecting-open the truth of being in word and concept.'" I add further: "In order to make music, an instrument must constantly be 'kept in tune,' and thus constantly tuned or modally adjusted. The originary turning is akin to this perpetual tuning."
3.0 - I can see from the video and from reading the 2.0 commentary, that I must have been a bit done and dusted 10 years ago today. And that's ok. One of the challenges of the original project was getting up for the writing each day. I suppose it's not unlike performance artists who have shows every day. But with 2.0 and more so with 3.0, there's much less pressure to find the very modalities and locations of thinking that were being described in the original. 20 years later I'm impressed with my younger's self's ability to go there day after day, and remember what a joy and sometimes a pain it was to find that location. But once I was committed to the process, and the tropes, language and categories, not to mention the major figures, starting emerging, it was almost like composing a big piece of music (something I can only imagine doing!), and the pun is of course intended: music-making philosophy! And this is why today's original meditation and the 2.0 commentary are so revealing. I wrote above: "And if we liken the human person, the one making-music, to an instrument, then the originary disclosure is a tuning, or, to borrow from Heidegger, an 'attunement'. So I write in PPM42: "this originary turning 'grounding attunement,' or that which 'attunes Dasein and thus attunes thinking as projecting-open the truth of being in word and concept.'" I add further: "In order to make music, an instrument must constantly be 'kept in tune,' and thus constantly tuned or modally adjusted. The originary turning is akin to this perpetual tuning." Attunement is one of those existential categories that has worked for a long time for me. I may only refer to it in passing in the Nancy paper, which, by the way, is getting closer to being published! But there is not question that the kind of listening that we can learn from the aesthetic experience with music is an example of 'attunement.' In the 2.0 commentary above I refer to the attunement to Being's presencing as affirmation of the disclosure of human freedom. (I phrase it differently, but that's the gist of it). Of course, this is a key theme of 'Being and Learning.' But "freedom" doesn't appear in PPM 42. What does appear are the terms "spontaneity," "improvisation" and "natality" which are described as identifying the "roots of Learning." These terms describes the origin of freedom, or the originating force of the originary encounter with Being, the attunement with Being's presencing, the gift of teachability. If the original project was put underway by a reëxamination of Plato's question concerning the "turning around of the student" then today I'm still interested in that question, but exploring examples of how that can happen, specifically through the aesthetic experience with music, art, etc., but also through study: reading and writing, and also through dialogue. And I'm leaning into Bachelard because there seems to be symmetry between the way he describes the encounter with the poetic image, as he calls it, and my project that returns again and again to that moment of improvisation and spontaneity, when something truly new emerges, or, to use Bachelard's language, is created! I've been using the slightly more humble term "making" (and I've discussed that in some of the preceding commentaries), but Bachelard is tempting me to use "creation"!
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